​Schools in the UK used biometric technology to gather the fingerprints of over 800,000 pupils between 2012 and 2013, a watchdog has found. In 31 percent of schools, children were roped into giving their fingerprints without parental consent.

Civil liberties group, Big Brother Watch, filed Freedom of
Information Requests to over 3,000 schools across the UK and
found that 40 percent of schools are using biometrical technology
on pupils. Only 1,255 schools responded.

Based on the figures, the rights groups estimated that as many as 866,000 school
children were coerced into having their fingerprints recorded in
2012-13.

"As we are now one term into the 2013-14 academic year, and
expect the number of schools using the technology to have
increased over the summer, and the secondary school population
now above 3.2 million, if the number of secondary schools using
biometric technology increased from 25% to 30%, more than one
million children would be fingerprinted," Big Brother Watch
report says.

More worryingly, the study found that in 31 percent of cases
parental consent had not been sought by the school. Biometric
technology was found to be most commonly used in the South East
of England, with 92 schools admitting to have gathered
fingerprints from students.

The report noted that The Department for Education keeps no
record of the number of schools using biometric technologies, nor
does it collate whether parents have provided their consent. In
this way, the Big Brother Watch is the first institution to
collate this data.

The UK introduced a clause in the Protection of Freedoms Act in
2012, stipulating a legal guarantee to parents that their
permission would be asked before biometric data is taken from a
child. The Big Brother Watch maintains that the fact that
children’s parents are not being consulted is distorting British
youth’s perception of their right to privacy.

“We continue to be concerned that the use of biometric
technologies threatens the development of a sense of privacy as
young people develop, while also creating greater opportunities
to track an individual pupil’s activity across multiple areas,
from the library books they take out to the food they eat,”
the report says.

The report recommends that safeguards are put in place to ensure
that the data gathered is deleted once the children finish
school. Moreover, it says that children must be made aware of
their right to refuse to have their biometric data recorded by
schools.